Invisible Hands & Infinite Money
Edging on the Event Horizon
Anything that can be gamed, will be gamed
That’s the first premise, and its one of those things that is self-evident. Why? Because in the realm of the possible, humans + time = eventually. Not sure about that? There are people out here that fuck cars, if you’re unfamiliar with Rule 34 have a gander at it. It’s the same reason it says “do not put in ear” on a box of Q-tips even though there’s maybe 5 guys in the world that buy them for any other reason. Some things are just bloody obvious, especially when it comes to humans. But its critical we recognize some that some things are self-evident because things like the base narrative of the enlightenment ride on it.
And all of our social constructs run on narrative, some big and some small, some that achieved network effects ages ago and some brand new ones consisting of nothing more than two people and a bad idea. So we’re going to take a deeper look at the jungle of competing organizing narratives and how they behave/gain/lose traction and the human psychology driving it all. Because the human experience in the information age is basically navigating this MMORPG of competing narratives all trying to catch fire. And many of them are fake stories promoted by fake profiles in which both story and storyteller were generated by automation. The Replicators from Star Trek are real, here, and digital.
This post is a dive into the relationship between human psychology vs narratives and how they intersect with technological advancements and human game play. You can’t not play.
All Narrative, All the Time
Successful narratives capitalize on two critical psychological traits in people’s values scale: understanding human’s desire a fair game & and desire for self-determination. People might say they value equality but in practice its not what they really want—people want fair games with winners and losers. They want somebody to win, they want to like the winners, and they want to be like the winners. But they want the challengers to have a shot, and they want them to be able to play again.
This desire gets exploited by horse race and both sides media framing of the narrative competition (which is all cable news is, a narrative competition)—it employs human curiosity to sell new narrative alternatives and is built on contrarianism for contrarianism’s sake. It incentivizes bad takes that even good and/or smart people get sucked into because it drives engagement, delivering a dopamine hit from the instant reaction on social media that comes along with it now.
If your goal is to push an alternative narrative to the prevailing you can be doing it because the prevailing narrative is outdated/disproven, unfair, or the narrative is pretty great and you desire to introduce unfairness to the benefit of yourself. Essentially the difference between when circumstance/advancement creates demand for a new narrative or your personal demand for yourself.
We can create a pretty simple psychological model to see how this works in action with just a few parameters. Humans need to feel special, humans desire freedom and fairness, and humans fear their own mortality. From the fear category we can divide them into two groups on how they compensate for it: people driven by the desire to control things (cheat death), and people who are driven to experience as much as possible (maximize life). From here you can craft organizing narratives to pitch anyone, for good or ill.
All Narratives are Not Equal
We have reached the point in the crypto narrative life cycle where it has been weighed and measured against the prevailing narrative and been found wanting. But wait! The crypto evangelist says, “they’re all narratives”.
Yes they are, and what better way to demonstrate the game..
Now Theron here could ‘just be saying’, but its typically a point that somebody makes when they're trying to infer their preferred narrative is just as good when it ain’t. Once your proposed narrative has been revealed to be solely narrative against one that has already delivered real returns in the game unreality is all ya got. Because that’s how all money works is only half the story obfuscating how the real game is being played at all.
Holy crap, the US dollar sucks and you are getting taken for a ride! Well, that is what this chart is trying to make you think anyways. The relationship between value and price is a psychological one and this is most definitely a shot across that bow. I mean, look at that great depression great buying power days, must have been great to have some dollars.
However, just asking a few questions about the US dollar and said chart reveals the underlying game of money’s narrative. ‘Is your buying power in the room with you now’ isn’t one of them.
What exactly does this old timey dollar buying power represent? Is this real estate, gold or butter? Does it even matter? What if we revalued American real estate in these old timey dollars, so cheap houses are like $25 and bread is like 1/1,00,000 of a cent--what does that make everybody else's money worth? Are we talking like 100 trillion yen for a sandwich or what?
The trick the chart is trying to play is using the fact that in real life and trade time is a one-way ticket to hide that the value of things can flow both ways on the time axis. Additionaly, not only is the relationship between value and price psychological—its not linear either. What say would sole capability to produce Intel Core 7s or iPhones worth in 1913? Everyone single one of those dollars and then some more at the very least.
A dominant tech edge is worth infinite money and in periods of revolutionary tech development everybody is throwing money at it, chasing it—because it is not optional. What exactly do you think your saved money will be worth if the other guy gets infinite money?
The edge is only worth infinite money if you're the only one who's got it and its worth a floating multiple of everybody else's if you have supremacy in it. When others catch up, their money free floats as peers against yours. Remember, market acess = tax payments = that’s money.
That’s the infinite money game. Because what is tomorrow’s decisive edge in technology worth in today’s “money”? All of them. Participation is involuntary because it relies on other societies not playing. Or accepting that you’ll get swallowed by a discount bulk dealing country like Russia that survives on unreality I guess.
Narratives that fail to deliver any kind of edge in the technology game have zero infinite money value, require an environment of unreality and/or violence to both achieve and maintain network effects. Both religion and bitcoin reside in this category. On a geopolitical scale the winner of this game now decides not only what its own money is, but since you need to buy the tech—their money is also your money now too homie.
Golden Goose Games
In what I argued as the main thesis of my first WWG post , in the information age the technology game cannot be won without gender equality. Prioratizing mediocre males in society over exceptional females while disappearing “others” is a guaranteed loss. Therefore the only play for the patriarchal or theocratic narrative to achieve dominance in the geopolitical game you have to collapse them and re-institute the males atop the hierarchy. It’s a war of ideas vs stuff so keep that in your head when takes like Zoltan’s are making the rounds; they can try to corner inputs in the outside game or internally destabilize via the inside game. Women’s inclusion in the technology game was the equivalent to dropping nuclear weapons in how humans organize society and infinite money edges. Good luck trying to undo it.
That is the outside, geopolitical game reality for the dominant player in the technology game; there is also an inside game for narrative dominance within that winner. By prerequisite women are included in the information age inside game. The inside game runs on how well your organizing structure can maintain technological edge and here we are back with voluntary/resilient vs K thanks man I’m out as soon as its possible to bounce categorization.
If the system can optimize the two psychological desires of people and thread the needle with an optimized ratio of fair games with winners and losers with free will they’re in the sweet spot, playing the golden goose games. When that breaks down, when the game gets tilted and systemic gaming of the system—in the information age that means amplification of an unreality. Tipped over into a place where winners can wish for more wishes.
I know everybody likes cool diagrams and stuff, so I made a handy one to visualize how the inside game board goes for the infinite monies tech winner. We’re playing the Autist Olympics part of the board now, the phase where the weirdos have gone pro, got paid, and are now trying to trip us over the event horizon so they can buy themselves some more wishes. They think they’ll get to be in charge of the infinite money game but in fact the goose is long cooked by that stage and its just a hop, skip, and a jump from the unreality womp-womp decomposition lane from there. Good goose game reforms get you early series Ben Sisko highway tokens, great ones get you a total enlightenment reload.
Ranked Choice is the Invisible Hand
Hopefully everyone following along so far has got a working mental model going of the infinite organizing narratives that make up our social constructs, that they all behave similarly depending on whether the narrative is reality based/manufactured, and how fair/unfair the dynamics are within the group. There is a bit of a symbiotic relationship with these two polarities given how manufactured realities will attract different personality types from the control/experience spectrum, but the truth is all whole thing is just one giant ombre plaid with endless overlapping Venn diagrams. It also is in constant motion with random orbits. Would make a cool looking fabric tbh.
It’s a complex stew of infinite permutations but at the same time its only as complicated as you need it to be. We don’t need dial it down to molecular detail to model the interaction between different organizing narratives and establish a working hierarchy. Here I am going to show the why behind markets being downhill from politics and politics downhill from social movements which are driven by human psychology.
Primary reasons being that inside game prevailing narrative within politics define the operating parameters of markets and trade, and winner take all politics don’t have an “invisible hand”.
Markets, because they are a collection of positions held by various traders are a perfect way to demonstrate group/herd dynamics in a complex massive multiplayer game of speculation on future value. The actual value is in constant motion following any number of outside variables and narratives and is not important for this exercise, only is it above value or below value at any given time.
Unless the market is trading into new all-time highs the market is revisiting a place it has already done business, and that place was either a cluster of trade or a directional move. Directional moves are often described as price discovery—and that they are, but what triggers price discovery is a break down of the coalition by pressing low conviction members of the group. They might like the general idea of being long or short, but not at this price anymore—the center has to move.
The previous time price was here the coalition of buyers and seller’s models said this was fair price or unfair price and initiated or closed positions accordingly. There were position holders from larger outside ranges that may have added to their book or lightened up, other time frames, scalpers, market makers—a chaotically diverse coalition of participants that previously operated at that price and time. Each model dealing is in fact an organizing narrative.
Going into the zone the prices there are either over or under value, and the price was either or over value when it originally exited the zone. So we are now testing this range where previous traders have to make a decision on what to do with their positions if they’re still holding them, whether or not to initiate new ones or add, exit or hold if they are trading into the zone from some place from the trip outside the zone.
If you travel clean thru the zone, and you are the guy pushing price you are trying to break that coalition node and force as many as possible to liquidate their holdings. If you are doing this in the opposite direction of current fair value the people holding these will not want to liquidate, they will in fact be hoping for new members to join the coalition from just outside the range because the price is now at a discount and the guy pushing price starts to incur huge expenses if hoped for forced liquidations do not trigger.
It takes size to push price, size in the market is in almost all cases smart money because of survivorship bias, and size doesn’t like to go head-to-head vs other size. In our scenario here size is exposing themselves to a new coalition of traders to veto the move.
On the right-hand edge, the price on the chart is a perfect representation of live action real time ranked choice voting. To the left is the historical record of said voting. It is prohibitively expensive to trade against the herd, new coalitions can and will form at any price to kick it back to the median.
This happens in regular consumer serving businesses too, consumer goods and retail are just ranked choice voting via dollars and shopping.
Rank Rejected Reactionaries
Now we’ve established it costs a lot of money to go against self-interested free forming coalitions lets examine the interplay between politics dictating markets. Because there is no invisible hand kicking political price exploration back inside the median, and it can cost very little money split coalitions and shift the entire market. This is about republicans of course.
The republican organizing narrative is a manufactured narrative, not based on empirical evidence or best known practices, and is dominated by their sub-group of Christian fascists who are trying coalition break their way into the prevailing narrative position after having experienced decades of prevailing narrative share loss at the national level.
Republicans present themselves as champions of the free market which is really just them trying to create the illusion that their preferred parameters include all the choices—while simultaneously enabling group elites to engage in unfair practices like pocketing externalities. But they most definitely are about establishing hard limits on what is considered acceptable trade based on their cultural values, which are based on thousands of years old myths. In their market you are free to be as Jesus-y as you wanna be.
The culture wars are a reflection of this narrative decline, the money follows the herd, and when it comes to their tastes the herd is long gone. Nowhere is this more visible than the Merry Christmas vs. Happy Holidays and the red cups at Starbucks.
Starbucks, in the business of selling you overpriced sugary drinks sometimes flavored with coffee, serves said drinks in non-descript red cups during the holiday season. They don’t say Merry Christmas on them to the chagrin of the Christian fascists. They established a whole sub “war on Christmas” narrative track over it that is naturally full of emotionally manipulative falsehoods while being spectacularly stupid at the same time.
Starbucks of course has nothing against Christmas. And really, almost nobody is against Christmas; Christmas makes metric shit tons of money for everybody. Starbucks has just grown to a scale that they serve the broad market and they happen to have large numbers of Jewish customers, Muslim customers, and every other kind of customer.
Starbucks wants all their customers to feel the holiday cheer and open up those wallets, which precludes serving Jewish folks $8 drinks in Merry Christmas cups. Starbucks, a group focused on maximizing profits does not want to carry the cost printing 5 different cups in every size which would then proceed to clog up all their service stations; making those profits possible.
These decisions are not made because they’re woke. They’re not trying to drive the culture, they’re responding to it. Regular people see red cups and think holiday festivities, Christian fascists see red cups and see loss of status for the narrative they’ve tied their entire identity to and gave them a head full of spiders.
We get a similar reactionary narrative against inclusive advertising, that companies are pushing culture that the white Christian male atop the republican hierarchy does not approve of. One need not look very far to find one of them ranting about plus size models in adverts (you are supposed to look good for him ladies).
There is no “big fat” glamorizing obesity in fashion my angry little incel, there is zero incentive for it. They might be trying to create some socially conscious do no harm kind of brand image, but that is secondary to profit and they only hit the airwaves because plus size sales already justify the ad spend. Again, this is the market reacting to the herd, not driving it.
Forced Political Liquidations
Political parties, organizations of overlapping interests and narratives, do not have an invisible hand kicking outlier positions back to the mean and have proven quite easy in the information age to game into extremes--and on the cheap. Social media has provided party organizers all the information and then some required to model out their preferred outcomes and push a radicalization cycle. From there they are just a few steps away from the power to frame markets.
A lot has been made of big data models and outfits like Cambridge Analytical, and I’ve read that they posses as high as 2,000-point profiles on all American voters. Their models may very well be complex, but all they’re doing to game the political process is ranked choice in reverse. These techniques dovetailed with the GOP’s “red map” red state strategy of taking over state houses, gerrymandering congressional districts to game out minority rule in a democratic system they rolled out in 2010.
With a data set comprised of reliable voter profiles you can choose which districts to fund outlier candidates, then direct ad spend and manufacture narratives via party media outlets specifically designed to break the actual voters in the districts into or away from whatever you want. Fox does not air Caravan coverage from the border around the clock during election season by accident. The five or so dominant issues covered in right wing social media-sphere at any given time are not chosen randomly. They are herding primary voters into extremist candidates like a parliamentary whip breaking opposition.
What they have done is weaponize voter’s ranked preferences to promote extremism, when voters can actually rank their choices of candidates themselves you get the exact opposite effect eliminating the fringe. Ranked choice voting was not feasible prior to the information age, but running it in reverse via big data to game the system wasn’t either.
In one scenario the invisible hand of the herd steadies the game, in the other a player assumes control of the hand. And when one group gets to play as the hand the game goes bust. The Christians that think they can play the hand and force their unreality into existence are just idiot thugs who believe they can replicate what the golden goose drew free hand. We here a lot about the United State’s original sin, but how often do we hear about our founding contradiction? A country born out of the Enlightenment, full of people running as far away from it as they could. They’ve been trying to undo best practices ever since.
That concludes part one, am breaking the post into easier lengths here and trying to do the shorter/more frequent resolution thing. Part two will cover a short history of the technology infinite money game, how unrealities are maintained via emotional manipulation, how we revert back to unreality when best practices narratives fail (lol Marx), and the means of emotional communication.
Another banger